Feature tiers make life worse for Professional Services teams.
Tim Munro, SyncMatters
Feature Tiers. Why we say NO.
At SyncMatters, the needs of Professional Services experts who choose to use our product come first - we strive to help them achieve hero status. We do this by ensuring they have the right tools to execute fast, with minimal fuss and no mess.
Have you ever been tasked with delivering a complex integration, having limited information regarding the integration's requirements before project kick-off?
Imagine learning during project kick-off that the tier of integration software quoted by your sales team & purchased by the customer lacks one feature that is vital to delivering the project.
You're faced with some tough choices:
- Forcing the customer to "buy more software", starting the project with a trust deficit, and risking the derailment of the project entirely.
- Hiding the problem and spending extra service hours working around the limitation, ultimately delivering a more complex, less supportable integration.
- Ignoring the problem and hoping it goes away (hint: it doesn't).
We understand that some integrations take longer to scope & set-up. Some require more support, and some run for more minutes each day or process more data.
In all these cases, it's reasonable to increase the customer's set-up or monthly support charges. It is unreasonable to require 2x increase in software licensing to gain access to a minor, but essential, feature that has been deliberately excluded from the product tier. That's a form of crippleware!
We've seen otherwise rational service companies make risky design decisions due to unreasonable "per tenant" pricing and arbitrary product feature tier lines.
Hey, let's buy one [integration SaaS] license and share it across all of our customers. What could possibly go wrong?
Co-mingling the data of customers in a single account is always a bad idea.
SyncMatters' standard plan charges a monthly account fee for platform access. That fee provides unlimited connectors, unlimited integrations, unlimited users, and unlimited [insert your favorite feature name here].
It also includes a generous "metered resource allowance." Put simply, this allowance can be considered the number of integration run-minutes, or how much data can be processed per month.
Need more resources? No problem, just pay for the overage at our always low rates.
Feature Tiers?
- Split a product across feature sets (Tiers)
- Steep/stepped price increases per Tier
- Bottom Tier lacks 1 commonly used feature
- Benefit the SaaS vendor not the customer